In a blog from the Twin Cities, LISC’s Jamie Schumacher delves into the ways Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and their partners are leveraging arts and culture to build—and rebuild—authentic human connection, community and commerce.
Photo above: Jamie Schumacher (pictured right) and community partners working on a mural in Bloomington, MN.
People make a place.
It’s a tenet I’ve held on to closely, especially as the past four years have bumped us back and forth from online to hybrid work, and back again. There are threads of connection that stitch our communities together, and while they may become unraveled through time and tragedy, it’s ultimately people who do the labor of stitching things back together again.
This is certainly the case here in the Twin Cities, as we continue the long labor of recovery from what’s been referred to as the “twin pandemics” – the economic impacts of COVID coupled with the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. In my role as creative placemaking program officer at LISC Twin Cities, I have the honor of working alongside the people who make our region’s creative and cultural districts vibrant and authentic.
I’m often asked what creative placemaking even is. While it can sound jargony, its essence is very simple: It’s art, culture, and economic development that reflect the people who live in a particular place. And that’s important, because our neighborhoods, especially our creative and cultural districts, are not cookie-cutter copies of one another. Some groups of neighbors are working to preserve the tapestry of community they’ve stitched together; others are trying to rebuild critical concentrations of people and cultural resources. Some were displaced due to market forces, freeway construction, or other factors beyond their control. All were impacted by the events of 2020, and all are determined to resist the forces that have met—and destroyed—creative and cultural districts across the country.
Arts and culture for all of us
I am a child of immigrants. My parents came to America from two very different countries—Sri Lanka and Poland. In 2003 I moved from Southern California to Minnesota, and gradually carved a career for myself at the intersection of art, culture, and community. My own varied experience of this vital intersection inspired a passion that fuels my painting and writing as well as my work at LISC. It’s part of what brings me to this work in creative and cultural preservation. I know the need for cultural preservation work is great for new immigrants to this country, important for those who are here, and important for the First Nations people who were here before us and are still here.
“We want to remind folks that Native Americans are a CONTEMPORARY people,” remarks Robert Lilligren, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Native American Community Development Institute. “Almost half the people in the United States don’t know that Native Americans are still in existence today!”
Our arts and culture work is urgent for the Minnesota community, and for our economy. According to the Creative MN report, the combined economic impact of nonprofit arts organizations, audiences, artists, and creative workers is over $2.167 billion annually.
Preserving Minnesota’s diverse cultural riches is a part of this equation, a key to our economic development. Eight percent of Minnesotans are immigrants, a percentage that has increased steadily since 2020. The immigrant community of Minnesota boasts an estimated purchasing power of around $12 billion!
Supporting cultural and creative districts is part of our local strategy for nurturing healthy communities. Research confirms what my community-organizing colleagues and fellow artists and I have seen firsthand—that these lively, distinctive districts can increase property values, incomes, and employment, too.
Supporting our creatives and culture bearers
I believe in the power of storytelling—and storytellers—to inspire and activate change. Throughout Minnesota, it was the artists and culture bearers who held us through the hardest moments of the last several years. During COVID-related closures it was creative workers who rallied, collecting unused boards and sets from theaters to secure the windows of buildings during the uprisings of 2020. Local artists then decorated and painted the boards with messages of hope, community, and solidarity.
That happened because we had the infrastructure in place to nurture our remarkable community of artists—advocacy and artist-support organizations like Minnesota Citizens for the Arts, Forecast Public Art, and Springboard, along with hundreds of arts and culture centers and thousands of individual artists. We’re all working together to tend to the soil of our creative ecosystem, to cultivate a better landscape for everybody who works here.
The tapestry we’re stitching together is lovely—but it’s not unbreakable. Systems aren’t perfect. Artists are among the too-often underemployed, underinsured, and under-resourced, and the first to go when the going gets tough. We’ve seen this story before, right? Artists move in to a battered neighborhood due to the affordable cost of living and readily available studio space. Murals pop up. Coffee prices increase to a small fortune. Cool-looking condos start growing like kudzu in the background and before you know it, what was previously affordable is no longer so.
What if, instead of being annoyed by the same repeating notes on a broken record, we brokered a different kind of deal? One that helps keep people in place if they’d like to be? That helps artists, arts-related small businesses like printing presses, and arts and culture organizations purchase their buildings instead of being priced out of them? That puts community creatives in ownership positions where they can build wealth, instead of seeing their creative labor leveraged by others for extractive profits.
That’s what we’re aiming for in the Twin Cities: Anti-displacement in the cultural districts. A push for community ownership, cooperative models, and a transition of space back into community hands—for good.
The systems, they are a-changing
We have a lot of power to advance these goals here at LISC, and together with the community and corporate foundations that join in the work. We can encourage changes that benefit our partners and communities, for example nurturing more equitable grantmaking processes. We can create better access to information, networking opportunities, and resources. Internally, we can work more closely with LISC’s lending and financing department to investigate and dismantle the barriers that have curtailed communities’ access to capital and financing, reducing ownership in places like our creative cultural districts disproportionately.
As LISC staff, we can try to listen before acting more often, and truly let the community lead what we describe as community-led work. It’s an aim we made locally in 2020, and we’ve never regretted it. This guiding value led to the creation and assembly of our Community Asset Transition fund.
We can also nurture educational opportunities on the critical role of creative placemaking, not as just a traditional economic development tool but as a tool to build wealth, in the fullest sense of the word, within communities—including financial wealth but also clean water and air, safety, housing, education, and access to art and culture. We can build local and national connections for our partners, opening doors for them in their work. And we can commit to sharing stories and successes in a way that centers our partners, something the communications team at LISC Twin Cities is working to do.
Last week I had the privilege of helping accept a proclamation honoring the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities by the City of Bloomington, MN, where I live with my husband and two girls. As a proud Asian American I want people to know our ethnic groups—the refugees, immigrants, and descendants of 75 countries—vary wildly. In fact, Asians have the widest income gap between the top 10% and the bottom 10%, a gap projected to only become wider.
We can be mindful of gaps like this as we talk about the economic development of our communities. Who has access to tools, housing, resources?
What comes next
It’s great we have such wonderful cultural districts to support in the Twin Cities. As we continue the work over the long term, we can start moving towards a broader goal: every community, every person, should have an access point to art and culture.
In my role as a member of Bloomington’s Creative Placemaking Commission, in my role as a LISC creative placemaking program officer, in my role as an artist, I work with that goal in mind. If we create those access points within each neighborhood, aiming for each community to be whole and healthy, it will slow down the broken record that repeats a cycle of development and displacement with each newly “discovered” hip district.
May has been a dizzying month, with ample local news coverage and our recognitions of AANHPI Heritage Month and Neurodiversity and Mental Health Awareness Month, all of which are cause for celebration and reflection. The evidence is clear that art and culture have broad and lasting impacts on the economics and wellbeing of people and neighborhoods. How we invest our time and energy is important. But all the research, studies, and indicators boil down to quite a simple truth: if we plant seeds of creativity and lovingkindness, if we nurture art and culture in our relationships and community, we'll be able to take joy in what grows.
About the Author
Jamie Schumacher, Program Officer, Creative Placemaking
Jamie Schumacher is LISC Twin Cities’ Program Officer for Creative Placemaking. She joins LISC from the West Bank Business Association (WBBA), a nonprofit organization that serves the West Bank / Cedar-Riverside community of Minneapolis. The area is one of Minneapolis’ key Cultural Districts. Jamie has been an active participant in the LISC’s Creative Placemaking program for nearing a decade. Her role at LISC is to oversee the Twin Cities’ creative placemaking program and cultural districts, as well as work closely with the team to support lending activities. Jamie is also a writer and an artist, and her work and passion lay at the intersection of art, culture, and economic development.